Drug delivery devices allowing for multiple dosing of a required dosage of a liquid medicinal product, such as liquid medicaments, and further providing administering of the liquid to a patient, are as such well-known in the art.
Drug delivery devices of this kind have to meet a number of user specific requirements. For instance in case of those with diabetes, many users will be physically infirm and may also have impaired vision. Therefore, these devices need to be robust in construction, yet easy to use, both in terms of the manipulation of the parts and understanding by a user of its operation. Further, the dose setting must be easy and unambiguous and where the device is to be disposable rather than reusable, the device should be inexpensive to manufacture and easy to dispose. In order to meet these requirements, the number of parts and steps required to assemble the device and an overall number of material types the device is made from have to be kept to a minimum.
Typically, the medicament to be administered is provided in a cartridge having a displaceable piston or bung mechanically interacting with a piston rod of a drive mechanism of the drug delivery device. By way of the piston rod, thrust can be applied to the piston in distal direction and a certain amount of the medicinal fluid can be expelled from the cartridge.
Drug delivery devices, such like pen-type injectors further comprise multiple housing components, for instance a cartridge holder adapted to receive a cartridge filled with the medicament as well as a pen body housing or body adapted to receive and to house the drive mechanism which is to be operably engaged with the piston of the cartridge. In particular with disposable pen-type injectors, the entire drug delivery device is intended to be discarded after consumption or after use of the medicament stored in its cartridge.
Since the cartridge is typically made of glass or comparable material being inert to the medicament disposed therein, the cartridge and the housing and/or the functional components of the drug delivery device should be discarded or recycled in separate ways. Proper recycling or discarding of the drug delivery device therefore requires separation of the cartridge from the drug delivery device, which by virtue of its disposable design is not possible, because the drug delivery device is generally not intended or adapted to be disassembled.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a drug delivery device of disposable type which provides an effective means to disassemble or to fractionize at least the housing components of the drug delivery device in order to enable separate recycling of the cartridge and the device components. It is a further object to provide a respective method for fractionizing or for decomposing the disposable drug delivery device in a well-defined and controlled way. Furthermore, it is intended to implement and/or to separate cartridge and device components in a cost-saving and efficient way, e.g. by only introducing minor amendments to the design of existing drug delivery devices.